The Red & Black

Deion Sanders and Bo Jackson have done it, and now Georgia quarterback Quincy Carter and running back Patrick Pass are trying to do the same thing — balance promising baseball and football careers at the same time.
While many of their teammates will be either at home or in Athens this summer, conditioning and preparing for next fall, Pass and Carter will be playing minor- league baseball for the Florida Marlins and Chicago Cubs organizations, respectively.
Which means nearly three months of long bus trips and baseball games just about every day for the two players.
Carter said his mental approach to baseball is much different from the one he uses in football.
“In baseball you have to come to the park and work hard because you have a game every day,” Carter said. “In football you have to practice every day and sometimes you can get by by just going through the motions, whereas in baseball you have to work hard and concentrate each and every day.”
Pass said the five-hour bus trips he had to go on with his minor-league team in Utica, N.Y., last summer were long and boring, but it wasn’t anything he isn’t used to by now.
“You get used to it after a year or two and this will be my fourth year (in the minors),” Pass said. “We would travel to Canada and (the bus rides) would almost drive me crazy, but it wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”
But both players took different paths to becoming two-sport stars.
Pass and Carter came out of high school the same year, 1996, and signed letters of intent to play football.
Carter originally signed to play football at Georgia Tech, but opted to pursue a career in major league baseball for the Chicago Cubs after the team drafted him in the second round of the 1996 amateur draft.
“For a team to take me so high, it showed they had high hopes for me,” Carter said. “From my perspective now, maybe I should have thought about college life and being a student more.”
Struggling in his first three seasons in the minors and hitting .211 at Class A Rockford, Carter said he realized he was missing something.
“I was missing football too much,” Carter said.
After watching a college football game in August 1997 in his baseball team’s locker room twenty minutes before a game, Carter said he decided it was time to give college football a try.
Signing with Georgia in 1998, Carter raised his batting average significantly, something he attributes to no longer having college and football on his mind.
And now that he has both in his life, Carter said he is out to prove to his baseball critics that he is a major-league prospect.
“I feel like I have something to prove in baseball, because people say that school is holding me back from really advancing in baseball,” Carter said. “Now that I have football, I don’t have to think about it. I can just go out and not think about it and give it my all in baseball every day.”
Pass’ experience in becoming a two-sport athlete was different. The Marlins selected Pass as an outfielder in the 1996 draft, but team officials encouraged him to honor his commitment to play football at Georgia.
“I told all the major-league baseball teams I was going to play football regardless of what happened with the draft,” Pass said. “The Marlins gave me a chance to do both.”
And Pass has been able to balance the sports since coming out of high school and plans on playing both for the next few years.
“I really like playing both and I think I have a good future in both,” Pass said. “Hopefully, I won’t have to choose between them until eight or nine years down the road.”
Carter and Pass said they receive no pressure from their respective major-league teams or from people at Georgia to make such a decision.
“From both standpoints, as long as I’m healthy, I think both parties will be healthy,” Carter said.
The Bulldogs may have another two-sport athlete coming in the fall in football signee Vince Faison. The Toombs County native has been projected as a high-round selection in this summer’s draft.
“(Faison) told me he wants to play football, so I’ve got faith in him,” Pass said.
Both players will be heading to their summer assignments after finals and will play right up until fall practices begin in August.
Carter said he is out to prove his skills this summer to another group of critics — his Georgia teammates.
“They get on me every now and then and say I can’t hit a curve ball, but they’ll see this summer,” Carter said.